Capacity, and Other Issues

Article
May 8, 2001

CAPACITY, AND OTHER ISSUES

Airport execs see ATC, unwieldy approval processes as top challenges

By John Boyce, Contributing
Editor

May
2001

Space and time appear to be occupying the
thoughts of a sizable segment of the population of airport executives
in the U.S. nowadays. Space, in terms of landside and airside capacity;
and time, in terms of the amount needed for projects designed to provide
the space to alleviate capacity problems.

Larry D. Cox, A.A.E., president and CEO
of the Memphis-Shelby County (TN) Airport Authority and the current chairman
of the American Association of Airport Executives (AAAE), summarizes the
overall concerns of many airport managers and directors by saying, "(It’s)
this constant worry about having adequate capacity within the air traffic
control system, and within the system of airports to accommodate the growth
that we have seen over the past decade and anticipate will continue over
the next couple of decades.
"It’s a daunting task and, unfortunately,
we’re facing situations where the processes and the organizations
are not up to the task or don’t appear to be up to the task of getting
us where we need to be without having an air transportation system that
is going to be approaching gridlock in the next few years. That’s
the thing that concerns me the most."
While Cox and many of his colleagues are
concerned about funding for their projects, even when there is no concern
about money, there is an overriding frustration with the slow-moving processes,
particularly those associated with environmental controls, that executives
have to contend with.
"We’ve spent ten years (trying
to get a runway constructed)," says Mark VanLoh, A.A.E., commissioner
at Cleveland-Hopkins International Air-port, "and we’re going
to finally be turning dirt probably next month (April) on a new runway.
It’s something that Cleveland has needed forever. We’re so constrained
here that Conti-nental is actually canceling flights to some cities. They
just don’t have the capacity anymore.
"But this environmental process is
a nightmare. We go through all these state agencies, we go through EPA,
then we go through national. There’s wetlands, noise; it’s just
incredible."
Overcapacity at curbside is a major issue
for Timothy Campbell, A.A.E., executive director of Salt Lake City International
Airport, particularly in light of the city hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics
next February. The airport has a terminal program underway, but it won’t
be completed for another eight to ten years.
"One of the aspects of being a (Delta)
hub airport," Campbell says, "is that you get a peaking of arrivals
and departures, which compounds the problems at curbside. You get these
large crushes of people coming and going all in a short period of time,
which test the curbside of even the best designed airport. Our airport,
quite frankly, is over capacity (landside) right now. It is designed for
half as many passengers as we’re handling today. That is giving us
some challenges and we spend a fair amount of time trying to make some
modifications and improvements to the curbside that, hopefully, will make
things better."

Overcoming Frustration
The frustration from delay increases when
the permitting process itself can endanger an entire project. Such is
the case at Southwest Florida International Airport in Ft. Myers. Robert
M. Ball, A.A.E., executive director, says that the population explosion
in the area and the resulting increase in air traffic has made it imperative
that a new terminal be built. But while he has the funding, he waits interminably
for the permits and worries that the wait might cost him the funding.
"It has been fully funded," Ball
says. "We’ve received a letter of intent from FAA, which has
designated it as a capacity-enhancing project. We’ve received a large
amount of state funding... We’ve renegotiated new airline leases.
Now we’re going through the process of getting permits.
"It just seems that the environmental
permitting process you go through takes forever. We’re in a situation
that if we don’t get these permits secured by this December we’re
facing a situation to where it’s going to impact our schedule and
our budget, and possibly we could start losing our federal funding. That,
of course, makes our bondholders nervous, and the airlines. We have debt,
and they (airlines) don’t want to pay rent on facilities they don’t
have."
Although he was specifically talking about
runway development, Cox in Memphis could have been, once again, summarizing
his colleagues’s concerns about any airport development when he says,
"We need to streamline the process — not to run over environmental
rules and regulations and laws, but to streamline it so that you can come
to an outcome; either yes, you can build it, or no, you can’t build
it. Otherwise it’s just slow death."
For Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena (CA) Airport,
that slow death has taken more than 20 years. Through a wildly complicated
process of permitting, lawsuits, and political maneuvering, the airport
has been prevented from building a terminal safety project that was identified
as necessary in 1980. Victor Gill, PR director at Burbank, describes the
process as "various sinkholes and swamps that we’re all wading
in."
A clearly frustrated Dios Marrero, executive
director at Burbank, says "The thing foremost in my mind is how do
we maintain and improve aviation infrastructure in this country with all
the impediments that are placed in front of every airport official...
"It’s local impediments, political
impediments. I would say the lack of initiative (on politicians’
parts) to act as a catalyst for projects. We’ve got a terminal safety
project we’ve been trying to do for 20 years. At the end of the day,
everybody needs airports and our citizens don’t want them near them
for noise purposes but they definitely want them near for convenience,
so it’s a real problem.’’
Marrero goes on to explain that local politicians
promote economic growth, which in turn gives rise to greater demand for
commercial air service. But the politicians don’t acknowledge their
roles in increasing that demand and try to distance themselves from —
indeed oppose — projects intended to help provide the necessary services.

SMALL AIRPORTS - "SOMETHING TO SELL"
Thomas P. Nolan, A.A.E., director of aviation
at Youngstown-Warren (OH) Regional Airport, has a different take on the
issue of capacity. His airport is under-used and he thinks it can be part
of the solution of the overall problem of capacity. Nolan says the Western
Reserve Port Authority has virtually rebuilt his commercial service, non-hub
primary airport, making it a viable alternative to nearby airports in
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Akron, and Erie.
"How are we going to best use those
small airports which have met the challenge of building the infrastructure?"
Nolan asks. "How can they best be utilized in the overall plan? We
get sick and tired of hearing capacity problems when we’re sitting
here looking out our windows and seeing lots of capacity. That’s
one of the most frustrating issues. Maybe it’s time I try to take
it to a level in Washington, where we can assemble a panel of worthy small
airports that can play that role" of helping alleviate capacity problems.
Nolan knows the world won’t come to
him, but he’s hoping AIR-21 will provide funding for marketing to
help him carry his airport’s message to the world. "So the biggest
issue for me," he says, "is how best to get exposure for this
airport and put it on the world market. It has such huge possibilities.
"Now that we’ve built our product,
we need some help. We need some money, I mean serious money, not peanuts
... to go out and get this great message out. We’ve got something
to sell. Too many small airports are trying to go into areas that are
unrealistic, but we’ve got something of value.
"We’re in the middle of a huge
population center — the fourth largest in the country — we’ve
got infrastructure now, and we’re poised to get involved even in
international traffic. We want to take it to that level. That’s the
biggest thing on my mind — how AIR-21 marketing is going to pan out."

The ATC Issue
Capacity, of course, comprises many factors,
not least of which is air traffic control. Airport executives as a group
are concerned about the outdated system. As Brent Kitchen, A.A.E., airports
director at Tulsa International Airport and its reliever, Richard L. Jones
Airport, puts it, "Air traffic control modernization is behind schedule."
Cox at Memphis is more blunt in his assessment.
He says it is "in desperate need of a fix. That, in my opinion, is
a system that has no business being in government. It’s a 24-hour,
seven day a week high-tech business that needs to be run like a high-tech
business, and it should be funded by the users, should be responsible
to the users.
"There should be federal oversight
for safety and so forth, which is a legitimate federal role, but we just
keep wallowing around in the government process of trying to operate the
ATC. It’s an abysmal failure despite some of the best people trying
to do a great job, but they’re just stuck in a system that won’t
work."

SEEKING COMPETITION
Capacity, infrastructure development, and
other issues affecting the air transportation system in the U.S. concern
C.M. (Mike) Armour, A.A.E., director of Asheville (NC) Regional Airport.
But the issue foremost on his mind and the one he deals with constantly
is the lack of competitive air service at his airport.
"For a city our size," Armour
says, "we actually have pretty good service because we have service
to Charlotte, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Raleigh, and we’re about to
pick up service to Newark. The problem is that we have severe leakage
from the standpoint of people driving to other airports.
"We feel the only way we can positively
impact fares is to provide additional competition and give the consumer
additional choices."
Armour says, in the past air carriers have
agreed to treat Asheville as co-terminus with Greenville-Spartan-burg
(SC), a larger market, thereby reducing fares to Asheville. However, it
was a tenuous handshake arrangement and, he goes on, some of the carriers
have adopted the attitude that, ’We charge what we do because we
can.’
"That gave us the impetus to move forward
with our air service development by trying to secure additional competition,"
says Armour.

PEAK PERIOD ACCESS

Other issues occupying executives include
mergers that could affect the volume of traffic into any given airport,
airline labor relations, and air quality regulations not yet clearly outlined
by EPA for airports. But Randall Walker, director at Las Vegas-McCarran
International Airport, has been thinking long and hard about the issue
of priority use of his airport.

As a public airport he can’t refuse
access to anybody, which means a mixture of commercial and general aviation
traffic possibly landing in the same peak times.
"We have a real concern about the type
of traffic that comes in," Walker says. "You have a twin-engine
with four passengers and a jet with 150 passengers. The prop job, since
it’s slow, eats up two landing slots for a jet, so when you’re
in your peak times one twin-engine prop is eating up two jets slots, which
is 300 passengers. Those are the kinds of capacity issues people are going
to have to address.
"We still have 30 percent of our operations
GA. Right now the system doesn’t allow you to do anything to drive
the non-productive uses into the non-peak times, so all this talk about
peak pricing is very important because somehow you need to ration the
system to what makes most sense for the entire system. First-come, first-served
basis doesn’t make a lot of sense."
Walker says his authority is "spending
a lot of money" upgrading and improving two reliever airports just
to the north and south of the city to entice general aviation aircraft
away from McCarran, particularly at peak times. "You can come,"
he says, rhetorically, "just don’t come when we don’t have
any space."